A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
(Full Story)
Search This Blog
Back to 500BC.
==========================
Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Tuesday, May 9, 2017
Felicitation To A Friend & Resolute Marxist
By Rajan Hoole –May 8, 2017
In
the normal course of events my long friendship and brotherly regard for
Sritharan, or Sugu, as he is called, and to several of his colleagues,
particularly Subathiran, or Robert, would have been unusual. Those of us
whose training had a professional bias and had successful careers with
domestic felicity mapped out for us, often ceased to think about things
that really matter. That
would normally have been perfectly all right. But when these persons
also had a vicarious urge to be heroes of Tamil nationalism, they also
gave their voice and tacit approval to maligning and killing as
traitors, those who thought and felt for the utterly hapless plight of
ordinary people, repeatedly forced into wars they never wanted.
For
persons who took the road that Sugu took, life has been full of painful
challenges that would have broken most of us. Sugu’s political career
goes back to about the era of the 1980 general strike for very basic
workers’ demands that was brutally broken up by JR’s government, using
JSS thugs, whom President JR ordered to have a counter-demonstration on
24thMay. They were used again in the 1983 communal violence.
This was the last time perhaps when there was an organised workers’
movement, supported by leading figures as Bishop Lakshman
Wickremesinghe. It was also a testing time for the Tamil nationalists.
My colleague Sritharan, who was then a lecturer in Jaffna University,
went with a delegation to ask the leadership of the TULF to express
solidarity with the workers. They were evasive and Mr. Sivasithamparam
suggested to them that it was a Sinhalese problem that did not concern
the Tamils. Being the main opposition party this was irresponsible and
insensitive. After what happened subsequently, I need not expatiate on
the historic irony and stupidity of that position, waiting for JR to
deliver.
Sritharan Thirunavukarasu
Those
like Sugu, who were early members of the EPRLF, struggled both
intellectually and emotionally, to start a people’s movement that would
be both internationalist and rigorously dedicated to the interests of
the people, going against the high tide of Tamil nationalism that
brought the LTTE to the fore. It is not hard to understand why several
of those who were with him, from Balakumar’s section of the EROS to
Premachandran, more recently, plunged into the Tamil nationalist tide
that swept people along to the horrors of Mullivaykkal.
To
give a flavour of the EPRLF in the 1980s, I will do well to quote N.
Pathmanathan, one of our leading civil servants, who did a term in
prison under the PTA from 1983 to 1987. He was helping other PTA
detainees to prepare their cases. He was astounded upon reading the
charges against an EPRLF prisoner caught putting up posters in Vavuniya,
which called upon Tamil and Sinhalese workers to get together and
launch a united struggle to establish a workers’ state that would
guarantee equality to everyone. Pathmanathan was struck by the irony of
detaining on a separatist charge, a man who should have been honoured
for his dedication to national unity.
Sugu,
whom we felicitate today on the launch of his book, we may say belongs
to the remnants of the historic workers’ movement that took a last stand
on their behalf in 1980. The crushing of that movement enabled the same
methods to be used against Tamils while our leaders slept. Sugu is
among the rare souls who have been through decades of fury and murder
and have come out with their character unblemished. What helped him
along was his sound intellect, constantly renewing itself through study,
interaction with the world and compassion for the suffering. It is the
kind of quality intellect that would be out of place in protected
academic establishments where place-hunting is the norm. A scholarly
mind as Sugu’s is rooted in a large universe spanning space and time,
and derives confidence and reassurance from the wisdom of the ages.
The
collection of his articles titled ‘To a new generation that consecrates
Humanity’ is dedicated to ‘the dead and disappeared in the struggle for
the dawn of humanity’ where he quotes Bharathy’s dedication to the
freedom fighters of India – ‘[May their] dreams come true’. Both
Bharathy and the lines from Tagore he quotes “Where
the mind is without fear…Where the clear stream of reason has not lost
its way…Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake”,
are an indicator of the man’s heart and his aspirations.
Like
the two of his mentors, Sugu is an unswerving internationalist. This
comes through in his article on the US – British led invasion of Iraq in
2003 and his joy at the Arab Spring and anxiety at its delicacy.
Through his sense of reality and disappointments he has faced, he tries
to see things in the light of reason and the way the world works, and
his emotion is characteristically restrained. As a man who placed his
life on the line in search of a liberated order, his words have a
poignant ring, when he describes the culture of murder that struck
parents and children at unseemly hours, and abducted children to fight
wars that the elite were running away from, and remarks: “For us who
have adopted such abominable practices to seek franchise and recognition
in the civilised world is utterly unworthy.”